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01.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-19

Too long; didn't solve

arXiv:2604.07593v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Mathematical benchmarks consisting of a range of mathematics problems are widely used to evaluate the reasoning abilities of large language models, yet little is known about how their structural properties influence model behaviour. In this work, we investigate two structural length variables, prompt length and solution length, and analyse how they relate to model performance on a newly constructed adversarial dataset of expert-authored mathematics problems. We find that both prompt and solution lengths correlate positively with increased model failure across models. We also include a secondary, exploratory analysis of cross-model disagreement. Under a difficulty-adjusted normalised analysis, both variables retain weak negative associations with realised model separation, slightly stronger for prompt length. Overall, our main robust finding is that structural length is linked to empirical difficulty in this dataset.

02.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

SurgVista: Long-Horizon Surgical World Modeling with Plausible Instrument-Tissue Dynamics

Scaling robot policy learning for autonomous surgery is challenging, as expert demonstrations are expensive and in vivo exploration poses substantial safety risks. Surgical world models address this by generating realistic, action-conditioned future frames from an initial observation, but existing methods exhibit two persistent failure modes: spatial interaction incoherence, where visible instrument contact fails to induce spatially consistent tissue deformation, and temporal fidelity collapse, where prediction errors compound across autoregressive rollouts and progressively corrupt visual quality. We present SurgVista, a surgical world model that mitigates both failures through two training recipes. Deformation Consistency Regularization extracts scene-point trajectories from training videos and enforces cross-frame coherence through latent contrastive learning, strengthening physically consistent instrument-tissue dynamics. Drift Adaptation Training mitigates long-horizon drift by perturbing conditioning frames with online prediction residuals and photometric augmentations calibrated to long-horizon drift statistics, sustaining visual fidelity over extended rollouts. To enable rigorous evaluation, we further introduce SurgWorld-Bench, featuring diverse procedure types, long-range rollouts, and decoupled metrics for instrument-motion accuracy and tissue-response fidelity. Extensive experiments show that SurgVista consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods across visual quality, temporal consistency, and interaction fidelity, with gains widening as the prediction horizon grows.

03.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-11

AI4Land: Scalable Deep Learning for Global High-Resolution Land Use Reconstruction

arXiv:2606.11793v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Uncertainty in the terrestrial carbon cycle remains a major constraint in climate projections, partly driven by the uncertainties affecting the land surface representation and variability in Earth system models. To address this limitation, we present a data-driven framework AI4Land, for generating high-resolution historical reconstructions and future projections of key land surface variables. The framework follows a two-phase approach using a U-Net architecture. In the first phase, which is the focus of this work, it reconstructs annual land use and land cover by integrating coarse-resolution scenario data with static geophysical features. In a planned second phase, the resulting high-resolution maps will be used to predict dynamic biophysical variables, particularly leaf area index, at finer temporal scales. Trained on Earth observation data, the models learn to reproduce spatially explicit and physically consistent land surface patterns, extending temporal coverage to periods lacking direct observations. AI4Land was developed and trained on MareNostrum5, demonstrating how GPU-accelerated HPC infrastructure enables global-scale climate AI pipelines. The final product is a suite of open-source emulators designed for real-time coupling with digital twin platforms, such as those developed under the Destination Earth initiative. By delivering realistic and evolving land surface conditions on demand, this work aims to reduce critical uncertainties and improve the predictive power of next-generation climate simulations.

04.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Spatially Selective Self-Training for Unsupervised Building Change Detection

Unsupervised building change detection aims to learn building-change masks from unlabeled bi-temporal remote sensing images. Existing label-free methods often follow a discrepancy-to-mask paradigm, directly using temporal differences, frozen foundation-model responses, prompt-based outputs, or post-processing results as final change maps. Although these strategies provide annotation-free cues, they do not learn a task-specific building-change detector and remain vulnerable to the gap between generic temporal discrepancies and building-defined structural changes. In practice, such discrepancies are often noisy and task-irrelevant, as appearance shifts, registration errors, and non-building modifications can produce strong but misleading responses. To address this problem, we propose SST-CD, a spatially selective self-training framework that reformulates fully label-free building change detection as end-to-end detector learning under noisy pseudo supervision. SST-CD uses temporal discrepancies as candidate pseudo labels and trains the detector only on spatially reliable pixels, whose reliability is estimated by a local consistency criterion that filters inconsistent regions from supervision. To further stabilize noisy self-training, a lightweight feature adapter recalibrates bi-temporal features, while a prototype-based decoder produces compact change and no-change representations. Experiments on LEVIR-CD, WHU-CD, and DSIFN-CD show that SST-CD achieves F1 scores of 83.08%, 91.69%, and 86.60%, respectively, outperforming existing unsupervised and label-free baselines.

05.
arXiv (CS.CL) 2026-06-11

Neural FOXP2 – Language Specific Neuron Steering for Targeted Language Improvement in LLMs

LLMs are multilingual by training, yet their lingua franca is often English, reflecting English language dominance in pretraining. Other languages remain in parametric memory but are systematically suppressed. We argue that language defaultness is governed by a sparse, low-rank control circuit, language neurons, that can be mechanistically isolated and safely steered. We introduce Neural FOXP2, that makes a chosen language (Hindi or Spanish) primary in a model by steering language-specific neurons. Neural FOXP2 proceeds in three stages: (i) Localize: We train per-layer SAEs so each activation decomposes into a small set of active feature components. For every feature, we quantify English vs. Hindi/Spanish selectivity overall logit-mass lift toward the target-language token set. Tracing the top-ranked features back to their strongest contributing units yields a compact language-neuron set. (ii) Steering directions: We localize controllable language-shift geometry via a spectral low-rank analysis. For each layer, we build English to target activation-difference matrices and perform layerwise SVD to extract the dominant singular directions governing language change. The eigengap and effective-rank spectra identify a compact steering subspace and an empirically chosen intervention window (where these directions are strongest and most stable). (iii) Steer: We apply a signed, sparse activation shift targeted to the language neurons. Concretely, within low to mid layers we add a positive steering along the target-language dominant directions and a compensating negative shift toward the null space for the English neurons, yielding controllable target-language defaultness.

06.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

QMCtwin: Master-Equation Simulation of Syndrome Statistics Beyond Pauli Noise

arXiv:2606.19848v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: As quantum error correction moves toward large-scale experimental implementations, decoder performance increasingly depends on how faithfully hardware noise is translated into syndrome statistics. Standard stabilizer workflows achieve scalability by replacing device dynamics with stochastic Pauli or detector-error models, but this compression can discard coherent phase information, nonunital drift, continuous-time effects of always-on couplings, and correlations generated by simultaneous Hamiltonian and dissipative evolution. Here we present QMCtwin, a sign-problem-suppressed quantum Monte Carlo framework for master-equation simulation of QEC circuits, and apply it to a full syndrome-extraction round of a distance-$7$ rotated surface code with $97$ physical qubits. The open-system model includes realistic superconducting-device noise mechanisms such as relaxation, pure dephasing, coherent gate miscalibration, residual $ZZ$ crosstalk, and drive-qubit detuning. By directly estimating syndrome observables from the QMC-generated stochastic density matrix estimator, we compare the master-equation dynamics with their Pauli-twirled Clifford simulation counterparts. QMCtwin predicts syndrome-extraction biases and correlations between syndromes and proxies of logical-string-parity that are absent or strongly suppressed in the stochastic Pauli description. We introduce information-theoretic diagnostics that further quantify how information concerning syndromes versus string-parity proxies differs between the realistic master-equation simulation and the corresponding Pauli-twirled model. These results show that QMC-based master-equation digital twins can expose noise features hidden by conventional Pauli/Clifford noise models and provide a practical path toward more accurate decoder-facing syndrome models.

07.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-18

Be Your Own Teacher: Steering Protein Language Models via Unsupervised Reward Optimization

arXiv:2606.18961v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein language models (PLMs) have emerged as powerful tools for controllable biomolecular design, yet their post-training adaptation typically relies on costly wet-lab validation or curated preference datasets. To overcome this supervision bottleneck, we introduce unsupervised reward optimization of PLMs, a comprehensive framework for steerable protein generation without ground-truth labels. Our key insight is that task-agnostic rewards, which combine intrinsic model uncertainty with extrinsic semantic consistency informed by protein representation models, exhibit strong correlation with controllability measures across base models and temperature regimes. Building upon this discovery, we propose two offline algorithms: Soft Reward Optimization (SRO) and Binarized Reward Optimization (BRO), which effectively maximize the classical RLHF objective induced by these proxy rewards. Extensive experiments on compositional out-of-distribution prompts demonstrate that both methods significantly outperform competitive baselines (DPO, KTO), while approaching oracle performance across multiple sampling temperatures, model scales and protein families. Moreover, PLMs fine-tuned with unsupervised rewards can achieve consistently higher coverage compared to their base model in pass@k evaluations. By enabling self-improvement of PLMs through their own generated experience, our framework provides a scalable pathway toward controllable biomolecular design in settings where labeled preferences or experimental feedback are scarce or unavailable.

08.
Nature (Science) 2026-06-17

Reimagining machine vision with optical computing

Authors: Unknown Author

A general-purpose artificial-intelligence vision system for use in image-sensing devices has been developed by embedding fundamentals of core computer-vision operations into a light-manipulating planar material called an optical metasurface. A prototype enables accurate, real-time perception and processing across diverse tasks, suggesting that this could be a solution for rapid, low-energy, on-device vision intelligence. A specialized ‘metasurface’ can preprocess incoming scene information on image-generating devices.

09.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-16

Spatial Priors via Space Filling Curves for Small and Limited Data Vision Transformers

Though Vision Transformers (ViTs) have become the dominant backbone in many computer vision tasks, due to permutation equivariance, their attention mechanism lacks explicit spatial inductive biases. This become particularly important in two settings: when model capacity is small or training data is limited. Inspired by the attention masking strategies in Linear Transformers and the scanning patterns of Vision SSMs, we introduce VIOLIN, a lightweight masked attention mechanism that encodes spatial structure within attention via Space Filling Curves (SFCs) with less than 0.0015% extra parameters and negligible computational overhead. VIOLIN scans the image using multiple SFCs to construct curve-specific decay masks, which are then combined and multiplied with the attention matrix. Across a wide range of evaluations, VIOLIN consistently improves performance. In limited data regimes such as fine-tuning on VTAB-1K, it boosts accuracy across all task groups and by up to 8.7% on the tasks where spatial information is essential. It can be combined with parameter-efficient fine-tuning methods such as LoRA to further increase the performance. Beyond fine-tuning, VIOLIN improves various small scale ViT architectures (e.g., DeiT, DINO) during pretraining on ImageNet-1K. Additionally, on pixel-level CIFAR-100 training, a task that is highly dependent on location information, VIOLIN increases accuracy by up to 7.2%. Overall, VIOLIN provides a computationally efficient yet effective way to inject spatial inductive bias into ViTs, especially benefiting small models and limited data settings.

10.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Quantum Machine Learning for Industrial Applications

arXiv:2606.14822v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Recent advances in Machine Learning have transformed numerous industrial sectors, yet classical paradigms face fundamental limitations: rapidly growing data volumes, rising computational costs, significant energy consumption, and the physical scaling limits of conventional hardware architectures. Quantum computing has emerged as a promising computational paradigm to address these challenges, giving rise to the field of Quantum Machine Learning (QML). In this thesis, the theoretical foundations of QML are investigated, with a focus on near-term and future practical applications. Three central challenges are addressed: the trainability of variational quantum circuits, their expressivity, and their resistance to efficient classical simulation. The trainability of Hamming-weight preserving variational quantum circuits is first studied, and theoretical guarantees are established that resolve an open conjecture on the absence of barren plateaus for this circuit family. Subspace-preserving QML algorithms are then introduced, including photonic circuits and quantum convolutional neural networks, and are designed to mimic classical ML subroutines while offering polynomial quantum advantage. Finally, variational quantum circuits are analyzed as quantum Fourier models, and a framework is derived to jointly characterize expressivity and trainability, from which conditions are obtained under which quantum models provably separate from their classical counterparts. These contributions are intended to advance the theoretical roadmap for harnessing near-term and future quantum technologies in real-world applications.

11.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-17

Quantum conditional entropies from convex trace functionals

arXiv:2410.21976v4 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We study geometric properties of trace functionals that generalize those in [Zhang, Adv. Math. 365:107053 (2020)], arising from a novel family of conditional entropies with applications in quantum information. Building on new convexity results for these functionals, we establish data-processing inequalities and additivity properties for our entropies, demonstrating their operational significance. We further prove completeness under duality, chain rules, and various monotonicity properties for this family. Our proofs draw on tools from complex interpolation theory, multivariate Araki–Lieb and Lieb–Thirring inequalities, variational characterizations of trace functionals, and spectral pinching techniques.

12.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-19

ViCoStream: Streaming VideoLLMs Can Run Beyond 100 FPS with Stage-Wise Coordinated Inference

Streaming VideoLLMs must continuously process incoming video while maintaining low query latency, making both video-ingestion throughput and query-time responsiveness critical for real-time deployment. Existing methods largely focus on accelerating individual modules, such as visual encoding, token pruning, or KV-cache compression, but provide limited insight into whether the resulting system can sustain real-time streaming performance. We formulate streaming VideoLLM inference as a coordinated pipeline spanning visual preprocessing, visual encoding, token dropping, and LLM prefilling/decoding. Building on this formulation, we propose ViCoStream (Video Coordinated Streaming), a stage-wise coordinated streaming framework that combines chunk-wise execution, CUDA-stream overlap, visual token control, bounded visual attention, and query-side retrieval to bound per-chunk computation and memory costs. We further provide a systematic study of bottleneck migration, revealing how chunk size, token retention, attention locality, and retrieval scope shape the throughput-accuracy trade-off. Experiments with Qwen2.5-VL-3B/7B-Instruct across multiple streaming benchmarks show that ViCoStream achieves 134 FPS video throughput and less than 50 ms TTFT on a single A100 GPU while maintaining accuracy close to full-history baselines.

13.
bioRxiv (Bioinfo) 2026-06-21

GENATATORs: ab initio Gene Annotation With DNA Language Models

Inference of gene structure and location from genome sequences - known as de novo gene annotation - is a fundamental task in biological research. However, sequence grammar encoding gene structure is complex and poorly understood, often requiring costly transcriptomic data for accurate gene annotation. In this work, we benchmark current solutions and develop new methods of gene annotation. We show that pretrained DNA language model (DNA LM) embeddings do not capture the features necessary for precise gene segmentation, and that task-specific fine-tuning remains essential. We comprehensively evaluate the impact of model architecture, training strategy, receptive field size, dataset composition, and data augmentations on gene segmentation performance. We revisit standard evaluation protocols, showing that commonly used per-token and per-sequence metrics fail to capture the challenges of real-world gene annotation. We introduce and theoretically justify new biologically grounded metrics, along with benchmarking datasets that better capture annotation quality. We show that fine-tuned DNA LMs outperform existing annotation tools, generalizing across species separated by hundreds of millions of years from those seen during training, and providing segmentation of previously intractable non-coding transcripts and untranslated regions of protein-coding genes. Our results thus provide a foundation for new biological applications centered on accurate gene annotation.

14.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-11

MobileFineTuner: A Mobile-Native Framework for On-Device LLM Fine-Tuning in Real-World Embedded AI Applications

arXiv:2512.08211v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are moving from cloud-centric services toward on-device embedded AI, where models interact with private, longitudinal signals sensed from users and their physical environments. Mobile phones are a natural platform for such applications because they are continuously carried by users, connected to wearable sensors, and deeply integrated with daily mobile applications. However, practical LLM fine-tuning on commodity phones remains difficult. Existing fine-tuning frameworks are largely Python-based and server-oriented, making them hard to deploy inside mobile applications. We present MobileFineTuner, a mobile-native open-source framework for end-to-end LLM fine-tuning on commodity mobile phones. MobileFineTuner is implemented in C++ and provides a reusable training stack. To make fine-tuning feasible under mobile resource constraints, MobileFineTuner integrates a resource-aware training runtime with memory-efficient attention, activation checkpointing, gradient accumulation, parameter sharding, and energy-aware scheduling. We evaluate MobileFineTuner on real mobile phones using GPT-2, Gemma 3, and Qwen2.5 models across multiple fine-tuning tasks. The results show that MobileFineTuner reproduces standard Full-FT and LoRA fine-tuning behavior, substantially reduces memory pressure and improves executability on memory-constrained phones. We further demonstrate MobileFineTuner through a private campus health-agent application, where a local LLM is fine-tuned on user-specific wearable-sensing records to provide more personalized responses while keeping raw records on the phone. These results establish MobileFineTuner as a practical toolkit for studying and building on-device LLM fine-tuning applications in embedded AI and sensing systems.

15.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-10

Human-centred design approaches to health facility design: Evidence from perinatal care settings in Ethiopia and Bangladesh

While significant progress has been made in perinatal outcomes over recent decades in low- and middle-income countries (LMICs), maternal and newborn quality improvement initiatives often fail to account for the spatial conditions in which they are implemented. Health systems are increasingly deploying evidence-based care models into built environments that are not optimally structured to meet the needs of its patient population. As the principal users, patients and health care workers can offer pragmatic insights about improving these structural designs. Our objective was to gather insights from patients, providers, and companions about how the physical design of their health facilities influenced their experience receiving or delivering perinatal care. We conducted a prospective observational study using a human-centred design (HCD) approach to analyse perceptions of the quality of perinatal care across two low resource settings: Ethiopia and Bangladesh. Using engagement and assessment tools, we conducted interviews, focus groups, facility walk-throughs, co-design workshops, and infrastructural assessments with patients, companions, providers, and Ministry of Health representatives. Descriptive statistics and thematic analysis were used to identify key learnings and develop recommendations. Across both countries, participants identified the need for facility layouts that better support privacy, mobility during labour, alternative birth positions, companion involvement, cultural and religious practices, sanitation, and provider visibility. Based on these insights, we developed six recommendations to better align health facility infrastructure with maternal and newborn care delivery needs. Our findings suggest that investments in health facility infrastructure may improve care experiences and help enable respectful, safe, and evidence-based maternal and newborn care. Alongside targeted spatial improvements, government authorities responsible for health facility planning should incorporate participatory design processes to ensure infrastructure reflects the needs of patients, companions, and providers and supports high-quality care delivery.

16.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-16

Information Is Not Physical: Possibility Spaces, Erasure, and the Structure of Unrealized Alternatives

arXiv:2606.15120v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: The slogan ``information is physical,'' introduced by Rolf Landauer and developed through quantum information theory and black-hole thermodynamics, has achieved near-axiomatic status in modern physics. Yet the ontological status of information remains surprisingly underexamined: most discussions either reduce information to a form of energy or treat it as a purely mathematical object. This paper proposes a third position. I argue that information is neither a physical substance nor a free-floating abstraction, but rather the structure of physically realizable alternatives – a counterfactual structure that a physical system instantiates in virtue of the possibility space available to it. Building on Shannon's combinatorial definition, the Landauer principle, the no-cloning theorem, and the black-hole information paradox, I show that the informational content of any physical event is constituted by the set of outcomes that could have occurred but did not. This counterfactual reading dissolves several persistent confusions: it explains why erasing information dissipates heat without making information ``material,'' why quantum superposition is informationally richer than any classical mixture, and why information loss in black holes is physically significant beyond mere bookkeeping. The proposal sits within a structural-realist framework but departs from standard structural realism by locating the relevant structure in modal, not merely actual, relations. I conclude by sketching implications for the foundations of quantum mechanics, quantum gravity, and scientific ontology more broadly.

17.
arXiv (quant-ph) 2026-06-19

Interaction geometry and ground-state properties of sparse quantum lattice models

arXiv:2606.20387v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: We investigate how interaction geometry shapes the low-energy phases of sparse tunable long-range quantum models. We focus on a class of graphs whose degree grows logarithmically with system size, and show how symmetry and frustration in graph connectivity can drive, suppress, and reshape ground-state phase transitions. The central examples are power-of-$p$ graphs, where even and odd values of $p$ exhibit qualitatively distinct behaviour: even-$p$ graphs inherit the rich phase structure of the power-of-two model, while odd-$p$ graphs are governed by geometric frustration. Fibonacci graphs provide a contrasting case, lacking the discrete self-similarity of the power-of-$p$ family but exhibiting a direct geometric mapping between the short- and long-range limits. Across our models, we find that phase structure and criticality are governed by the same effective-geometry principle, unifying our framework for experimentally motivated long-range quantum systems.

18.
arXiv (CS.AI) 2026-06-16

Feature Attribution in Directed Acyclic Graphs Using Edge Intervention

arXiv:2606.15273v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Shapley value-based feature attribution methods face challenges in scenarios involving complex feature interactions and causal relationships, even when a causal structure is provided. Existing methods typically adopt a node-centric view, attributing importance solely to individual features. Consequently, they often fail to simultaneously capture the externality and exogenous influence of features, leading to unreasonable interpretations. To overcome these limitations, we propose a novel feature attribution method called DAG-SHAP, which is based on edge intervention. DAG-SHAP treats each feature edge as an individual attribution object, ensuring that both externality and exogenous contributions of features are appropriately captured. Additionally, we introduce an approximation method for efficiently computing DAG-SHAP. Extensive experiments on both real and synthetic datasets validate the effectiveness of DAG-SHAP. Our code is available at https://github.com/ZJU-DIVER/DAG-SHAP.

19.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

The N-Body Problem: Parallel Execution from Single-Person Egocentric Video

Humans can intuitively parallelise complex activities, but can a model predict this from observing a single person? Given one egocentric video, we introduce the N-Body Problem: predicting how N individuals, can hypothetically perform the same set of tasks. The goal is to maximise speed-up, but naive assignment of video segments to individuals often violates real-world constraints, leading to physically impossible scenarios like two people using the same object or occupying the same space. To quantify this, we formalise the N-Body Problem and propose a suite of metrics to evaluate both performance (speed-up, task coverage) and feasibility (spatial collisions, object conflicts and causal constraints). As a proof of concept, we introduce a structured prompting strategy that guides a Vision-Language Model (VLM) to reason about the 3D environment, object usage, and temporal dependencies, producing a viable parallel execution. On 100 videos from EPIC-Kitchens and HD-EPIC, for $N = 2$, our structured prompt improves action coverage by 45% over a baseline prompt for Gemini 2.5 Pro, while simultaneously slashing collision rates, object and causal conflicts by 51%, 52% and 55% respectively.

20.
arXiv (CS.CV) 2026-06-11

Continual Learning with Support Boundary Experience Blending

Continual learning (CL) seeks to mitigate catastrophic forgetting when models are trained with sequential tasks. A common approach, experience replay (ER), stores past exemplars but only sparsely approximates the data distribution, yielding fragile and oversimplified decision boundaries. We address this limitation by introducing Support Boundary Data (SBD), generated via differential-privacy-inspired noise into latent features to create boundary-adjacent representations that implicitly regularize decision boundaries. Building on this idea, we propose Experience Blending (EB), a framework that jointly trains on exemplars and SBD through a dual-model aggregation strategy. EB has two components: (1) latent-space noise injection to generate support boundary data, and (2) end-to-end training that jointly leverages exemplars and SBD. Unlike standard experience replay, SBD enriches the feature space near decision boundaries, leading to more stable and robust continual learning. Extensive experiments on CIFAR-10, CIFAR-100, Tiny ImageNet, and ImageNet1K demonstrate consistent accuracy improvements of 10%, 6%, 13%, 2%, respectively.

21.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-17

Verified Detection and Prevention of Concurrency Anomalies in Multi-Agent Large Language Model Systems

Authors:

arXiv:2606.17182v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Multi-agent LLM systems share state through memory stores, vector indices, and tool registries. We model such sharing as long-running read-generate-write operations under deterministic-generation semantics – the regime durable-execution engines enforce by deterministic replay – and formalize four concurrency anomalies in TLA+: stale-generation, phantom-tool, causal-cascade, and tool-effect reordering, structural analogues of classical isolation anomalies, each with a TLC counter-example. The exclusion lattice over these anomalies is trivial; the contribution is the mechanically verified realizability and strict separation of one maximal chain within it, $L_0 \subsetneq \cdots \subsetneq L_4$, to our knowledge the first machine-checked consistency hierarchy for such runtimes. A development of 274 Verus obligations (zero assume, zero admit; trust base: two structural axioms and a mutex correspondence) proves the detectors sound and complete against the specifications and each runtime its avoidance set. Three deployed Rust runtimes realize L0-L1 (pessimistic locking, serializable snapshot isolation, default-SI), each verified against stale-generation and refined to its state machine; L2-L4 are exec-mode-verified with dependency-free prevention twins (A3, A6, A2: 0/1000 versus 1000/1000), and L2 is run live across three model families (A3 prevented in all 120 retracted sessions). We reproduce a silent lost update in ByteDance's deer-flow, formalizing its fix as a verified $L_0 \to L_1$ refinement, and exhibit tool-effect reordering in LangGraph's ToolNode on unmodified output, removed by an L3 commit-order sequencer. The verified detector, refinements, and realizability artifacts are the contribution; the phenomena and lattice are classical.

22.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-15

Quantitative insights into the role of phages and plasmids in the persistence of nontuberculous mycobacteria in chloraminated drinking water

Nontuberculous mycobacteria (NTM) are opportunistic pathogens that persist in chloraminated drinking water systems, yet the roles of phages and plasmids in their persistence remain largely unexplored. Using genome-resolved and quantitative metagenomics, we characterized NTM, phages, prophages, and plasmids in a chloraminated building plumbing system. Bacterial metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) and viral operational taxonomic units (vOTUs) were quantified at mean concentrations of 8.41 * 10^7 and 8.00 * 10^8 copies/L, respectively, including seven NTM MAGs at a mean total concentration of 4.01 * 10^5 copies/L. NTM concentrations were highest at the site with the lowest bacterial and viral diversity. Predicted NTM-infecting virus concentrations were inversely related to NTM concentrations across sites, suggesting complex phage-host dynamics that warrant direct experimental investigation. NTM, putative phages, prophages, and plasmids encoded functions related to disinfectant tolerance, stress response, metal resistance, and secretion. These findings identify phage interactions, prophages, and plasmids as overlooked genomic and ecological dimensions of NTM persistence in engineered water systems.

23.
medRxiv (Medicine) 2026-06-12

High coverage, persistent gaps: quality of Antenatal Care and its determinants in Zambia based on the 2024 Demographic and Health Survey.

Abstract Background Evaluating antenatal care (ANC) quality is critical to reducing maternal and neonatal mortality. In Zambia, despite high basic ANC attendance, comprehensive national evidence on the clinical content and quality of services remains limited. This study assessed the coverage of WHO-recommended ANC interventions and identified factors associated with care quality using the latest national data. Methods A cross-sectional analysis was conducted using data from the 2024 Zambia Demographic and Health Survey. The final analytic sample comprised 4,829 women aged 15-49 with a live birth in the preceding 5 years. A composite index of 15 selected, equally weighted WHO-recommended components evaluated clinical assessment, counseling/screening, preventive interventions, and utilization. Survey-weighted Poisson regression estimated adjusted incidence rate ratios (aIRRs) for the count of ANC components received. Results The mean ANC quality score was 12.5 out of 15 (95% CI: 12.4-12.6), and 78.5% (95% CI: 77.0-80.0) of women achieved adequate ANC ([≥] 12/15 components). While individual clinical and counseling coverage generally exceeded 90%, only 47.2% (95% CI: 45.3-49.0) of women initiated care during the first trimester, and just 4.8% (95% CI: 4.1-5.6) achieved [≥] 8 ANC contacts. Maternal education was the strongest and most stable predictor of quality across all models. Compared to no education, higher education was associated with an 8.0% higher expected quality score (aIRR = 1.080, 95% CI: 1.051-1.110). Lower ANC quality was significantly associated with unwanted pregnancies (aIRR = 0.970, 95% CI: 0.956-0.993) and with residence in Western (aIRR = 0.923, 95% CI: 0.897-0.951) and North Western (aIRR = 0.966, 95% CI: 0.937-0.996) provinces. Absence of distance barriers and residence in Eastern, Luapula, and Copperbelt provinces were associated with higher quality scores. Conclusion While average ANC component coverage in Zambia is high, critical gaps persist in early initiation and total contact frequency. Care adequacy is strongly influenced by maternal education, relationship status, pregnancy intention, and regional inequities. These findings underscore the need for interventions targeted at uneducated women, preventing unintended pregnancies, and underserved regions such as Western and North Western Provinces. Keywords: Antenatal care quality, ANC content, Zambia, maternal education.

24.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-16

Floating-Point Networks with Automatic Differentiation Can Represent Almost All Floating-Point Functions and Their Gradients

arXiv:2605.01702v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: Theoretical studies show that for any differentiable function on a compact domain, there exists a neural network that approximates both the function values and gradients. However, such a result cannot be used in practice since it assumes real parameters and exact internal operations. In contrast, real implementations only use a finite subset of reals and machine operations with round-off errors. In this work, we investigate whether a similar result holds for neural networks under floating-point arithmetic, when the gradient with respect to the input is computed by the automatic differentiation algorithm $D^\mathtt{AD}$. We first show that given a floating-point function $\phi$ (e.g., a loss function), arbitrary function values and gradients can be represented by a floating-point network $f$ and $D^\mathtt{AD}(\phi\circ f)$, respectively. We further extend this result: given $\phi_1,\dots,\phi_n$, $D^\mathtt{AD}(\phi_i\circ f)$ can simultaneously represent arbitrary gradients while $f$ represents the target values, under mild conditions. Our results hold for practical activation functions, e.g., $\mathrm{ReLU}$, $\mathrm{ELU}$, $\mathrm{GeLU}$, $\mathrm{Swish}$, $\mathrm{Sigmoid}$, and $\mathrm{tanh}$.

25.
arXiv (CS.LG) 2026-06-15

Multi-Variable Stellar Parameter Estimation Using Residual Multitask Neural Networks

arXiv:2606.13868v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We present an end-to-end pipeline for estimating stellar parameters from Sloan Digital Sky Survey Data Release 12 spectra using a fully connected multitask neural network with residual blocks, whose hyperparameters are tuned via Bayesian optimization. The preprocessing pipeline includes per-spectrum standardization, RobustScaler normalization of the target variables – effective temperature $T_{\mathrm{eff}}$, metallicity $[\mathrm{Fe/H}]$, and surface gravity $\log g$ – and data augmentation via Gaussian noise injection. On a held-out test set, the model achieved Mean Absolute Errors (MAE) of $59.76~\mathrm{K}$ for $T_{\mathrm{eff}}$, $0.103~\mathrm{dex}$ for $[\mathrm{Fe/H}]$, and $0.130~\mathrm{dex}$ for $\log g$. Normalized against the full-scale range of each parameter, these results represent range-normalized errors between $1\%$ and $3\%$, achieved with a highly efficient model complexity of approximately 540,000 trainable parameters. These results demonstrate that a compact residual multitask architecture, combined with principled signal preprocessing, provides a parameter-efficient solution for nonlinear parameter estimation in large-scale spectral datasets. In particular, the proposed model achieves competitive performance with substantially lower complexity than deeper neural network baselines.